My introductory essay from The Rooster Princess and other Tales.

A few years ago, to stave off boredom at the beginning of the pandemic, I started working on storytelling with my twelve-year-old granddaughter. After she chose a Jewish story to learn, we began to visualize the characters in her story. When asked to describe how she saw Elijah the prophet, she said, without hesitation, “I see a woman.”

I was floored. As a storyteller whose specialty is stories with strong female characters, I’m well aware there is a lack of powerful female imagery in all of folk literature. I also know it’s crucial to visualize characters fully to transmit clear images to the audience, so listeners can identify with story characters. But my granddaughter’s response illustrated the cognitive dissonance so viscerally that I was stunned.

After over a decade of secular storytelling, when I ventured into Jewish stories in the mid-1980s, I was surprised at how difficult it was to find Jewish tales featuring powerful female characters. This seemed ironic, given the obvious strength of Jewish women. Over the years, I found myself slipping some female characters into the stories and changing a few male protagonists into females. Why not? My criterion was simple: if it didn’t change the basic meaning or plot of the story, the character could be female. There was always the sense, however, of meddling with something sacrosanct. These Jewish stories have been handed down for centuries, and who was I to change them?

At the same time, I was familiar with the deep effect that oral storytelling has on listeners. I often describe storytelling as a “contact sport.” When a teller puts forth imagery, she senses the audience receiving it in a kind of “story trance” as the feelings go back and forth between the teller and the listeners. Our body of folk literature, carrying the key values of our culture, is thus absorbed deeply in a new dance with each audience.

Furthermore, the depth of that absorption depends on how much the listeners identify with the story characters. Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, and other psychologists have written extensively about the power of identification with archetypal characters. Briefly, if we see ourselves in the heroes as they slay huge dragons or resolve little problems, we draw a vicarious satisfaction that helps us deal with our own inner conflicts. If the hero is always male, though, half of the audience will have trouble joining in the symbolic struggles and victories. I wanted to give my listeners a storytelling experience that was not only enlightening, but also one they could personally relate to.

When I started training maggid (Jewish storyteller and Torah teacher) students in 2009 with my husband Rabbi David Zaslow, the majority of our students were female. My first instruction to students is always to find a story that resonates with them. As my students perused the stories, it was painfully evident, yet again, that women were mostly absent from the core tales that impart the values of our culture and religion.

Of course, over the years there has been a shift in the interpretation of Jewish scripture, and in spiritual leadership. Women are being ordained as Rabbis in increasing numbers, and for several years women have been publishing works with female interpretations of the Torah. New creative imaginings (midrash) of biblical women have emerged from our rabbis and poets. In 2016, Yael Kanarek conceived Torah Ta (Her Torah), with a Torah written with all the gender roles reversed. This parallels a paradigm shift across cultures and religions that allows women, for the first time, to see themselves reflected in an image of the divine.

However, despite all the feminization of Torah interpretation, with even the Torah itself rewritten in a reverse-gender form, there are still no new forms of classic Jewish folklore. In every culture the stories of the people provide food for ingesting values and traditions. Yet, all the Jewish stories written by and about men have been passed down for centuries with little change. While there are a couple anthologies of Jewish stories that feature women, they are very few in comparison with the large body of Jewish stories.

In 2019, after reading a collection of stories of the Baal Shem Tov (the eighteenth-century rabbi who founded Hasidism), our maggid-student cohort expressed their dismay at the lack of female protagonists and the apparent sexism of many of the stories. It seemed like it was time to do something, and the germ of an idea for this collection was born.

Although I’d been slipping female characters into oral stories for years, as I’m sure other storytellers have done, I was hesitant to commit that experiment to print. The haunting question of Who am I to change the sacred tradition? remained. However, when I witnessed my granddaughter’s innocent effort to imagine a major Jewish character as female, it became obvious that these changes needed to be published, and an answer emerged. Who am I? A Jewish storyteller, that’s who. And my colleagues and I have the responsibility and privilege to provide a turning point for future generations of storytellers, readers, and listeners.

Each woman in our Jewish Women’s Storytelling Collective has graduated from our training program as a maggidah (female storyteller). Collectively they are maggidot. They have contributed a variety of regendered stories to this collection, along with some original stories and personal stories. Our diversity includes a range of ages, gender identities, and sexual orientation. We live on the West Coast, East Coast, Southwest, and one even in the Netherlands. We are not only storytellers, but also poets, visual artists, theatre professors, dancers, Torah teachers, rabbinic students, musicians, day-school teachers, and most importantly, each of us is an innovative, risk-taking feminist.

Our goal is to offer a fresh collection that includes traditional stories teaching basic Jewish and universal human values while featuring female characters in the central roles. The purpose of this anthology is not to eliminate the stories that highlight male characters but to offer an alternative version that is equally inspiring to girls and women. It was important that we did not change the basic meaning of the traditional stories and that we acknowledge their sources. We hope female readers will see themselves reflected in the variety of roles in these stories, and that all readers will savor the restoration of balance to Jewish folk literature.

I recently told a regendered Chanukah story (“Secret of the Chanukah Flame”) at a gathering at a local senior center. After the telling, a sixty-year-old woman stood with her arm around her ninety-year-old mother. “I’ve heard that story before,” she told me, “But it feels different now.” Both of them had tears streaming down their faces. Our hope is that tears flow down the faces of women everywhere as they begin to see themselves in the compelling stories of our people.